The Face of Evil - Episode 4

When watching the early moments of this episode the thing that strikes me is that there isn’t any real indication as to what the story is building up to something. It’s difficult when there isn’t a physical villain like there was in the previous story or most stories. The story also suffers from the fact that the people the Doctor does encounter to be disruptive are slightly ridiculous and don’t offer any proper menace. I still can’t get over how ridiculous the green costumes are. The savages are the better of the two but it’s only been in this episode that I have thought this.

It does take about ten minutes for the Doctor to come up with what sounds like a plan and that is to try and wipe his memory print from xoanan and that feels like a bit of an anti-climax. One of the better things in this episode is when the Doctor and Leela go to Xoanan after the Doctor has woken up. It seems to end things quite nicely and the voice of Xoanan is different enough to indicate that things have been sorted.

The scene where Leela joins the Doctor in the TARDIS is a strange one because its clear that the Doctor doesn’t really want Leela to join him and gets annoyed when she runs into the TARDIS. I don’t think the Doctor has been so unkeen on someone in the TARDIS since Harry was on the show. I think that as a story this one was disappointing because there wasn’t much that I really liked and I think that Leela’s first adventure wasn’t her best. Thankfully she will get better stories as her time on the show progresses but this all studio story lacked anything that could be classed as top rate.

This is another short review and the shortness of this review should be enough to show how much I haven’t warmed to this.